


Sun, You Sleep in Clouds of Fire

by LikeSatellites



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Asshole Ex!JJ, Bouncer!Otabek, Bouncers, Dom/sub Play, Fighters, Fighting Kink, Gangsters, M/M, Retired Fighter!Viktor, Rookie Fighter!Yuuri, Spanking, Vikturi is slow burn i won't lie, Yuris like it rough, a bit dystopian, alternate universe-fighting rings, alternating pov, breath play, minor blood play, pain play, past!JJxYuri
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-30
Updated: 2017-01-22
Packaged: 2018-09-13 07:02:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9111670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LikeSatellites/pseuds/LikeSatellites
Summary: Yuuri Katsuki is not a good fighter.But he fucking loves it.“You want to fight?”“I want to fight like you.”“You want to fight me or fight like me?”Yuuri considers that a moment. He offers a small smile.Viktor accepts it.To the Yu(u)ris, fighting is beautiful. In these rings, the winner isn't determined by skill, but by favor.





	1. Well, I made you

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, friends, here is my contribution to the YoI fandom. Some of my recent fics have been less dark than my previous ones, so here I am again to fuck shit up in a generally happy, fluffy fandom. As always, please leave comments and kudos to your heart's desire. I have the second chapter ready with Yuri's POV, but for now, here is chapter one.

Yuuri's POV:

 

Yuuri remembers the first time he watched Viktor fight.

He was thirteen and had snuck in with his friend, dragged behind him like a lost little Japanese child in a marketplace, dipped under the thick black ropes where the bouncers were dropping heavy wooden boxes of liquor onto carts.

“It’s him,” Phichit hissed, little tan finger jabbing the air towards the ring.         

Viktor Nikiforov was seventeen at the time, but the official word was eighteen. Papers were easily forged. He was lithe, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, and pale as the stars, with wiry limbs and corded muscles.

Yuuri knew right away that Viktor was beautiful. There was no way around it. His hair was gray in a way that looked unnatural, but Yuuri couldn’t picture him any other way . He’d never seen Viktor’s eyes up close, but the kids at school said once they were made of sea glass, the kind washed ashore after a wreck, thick sections of cloudy blues and grays.

Viktor was like a lot of the fighters, an immigrant kid from a rich family. He would fight for a few years, win, then move on to owning a territory. Probably his home country, Russia. There was a lot of competition over there, not like where Yuuri’s family came from. There weren’t many Japanese fighters. There may not have been any at all, at the time.

His opponent was another Russian, Georgi. He was the gaudier kind of fighter, like he was just a kid in a costume. He’d painted thick lines of kohl around his eyes, some smeared down onto his cheeks with sweat.

Viktor leaned against the wall by the ring, listening to his coach absently as he scanned the crowd.

For a moment, Yuuri was sure Viktor was looking at him because he felt the air around him thin, as if Yuuri were standing in the middle of a cloud, thousands of miles above the ring.

Then the bell rang, and Viktor tugged his hair up into a messy bun, his signature start. The movements were somehow so graceful, so purposeful, just in that simple action. Yuuri was taken before the fight even began.

Georgi hopped around a lot. A lot of the showier fighters did. Made it seem like they were fast, but they were really just good at jumping. Viktor was fast. His calf muscles were like tight knots as he danced around Georgi’s swings.

Georgi hooked Viktor quick across the jaw, but Viktor barely stumbled. He turned his head to the side, spat, and went back in. He got a knee into Georgi’s stomach, and Georgi crumpled just long enough for Viktor to get him again under the chin.

Georgi looked up, blood dribbling from his lip in a thick line, and he motioned his head to the stands. Viktor didn’t react. Georgi continued doing it, just this jerk of his head, the skin of his chin splitting over the bone, blood like a web down his neck.

Yuuri thought he saw Georgi mouth something before Viktor finally blinked.

Georgi rushed forward, grabbing Viktor by the arm, twisting it behind his back. With his arm locked behind him, Viktor couldn’t stop Georgi from getting a knee to his ribs.

Viktor spat again, blood on the sandy floor of the ring. He scuffed at it with his shoes. His hands were still fisted, wrapped in gauze.

Georgi hissed something again.

Viktor smirked, cupping Georgi’s chin with his fingers and hissing something in return. He wheeled backwards, fists back up, jabbing three quick punches in succession, chest, chin, nose. Georgi stumbled back and almost stepped out of the ring. Not that it mattered, the lines were for show. No one had ever, to Yuuri’s knowledge, been disqualified. Died, maybe, but not disqualified.

Viktor’s coach and Georgi’s coach were on the sidelines, arguing about something. Gesturing in that way men do when they each believe they are right. Men started to gather near the ring, looming dark figures in the crowd that weren’t there before.

“Looks like Viktor was predicted to lose,” Phichit whispered, hands cupped warmly around Yuuri’s ear.

Yuuri had never heard of Viktor losing. Not once.

Viktor’s smile faltered.

Yuuri found himself crawling through the crowd at the upper deck, elbowing his way to the railing. His fingers curled around the rusting metal, and it flaked off, redorangebrown in his palms.

Viktor stepped forward to the middle of the ring. People rarely stood in the center of the ring. Went against all survival urges to get the fuck away. In those precious moments that Yuuri had broken through the crowd, something inside Viktor had shattered. Yuuri could see it in Viktor’s stance, in the set of his lips.

Georgi came at him, a blur of movement, harsh, rapid, like slick oil coating Viktor’s body with hits. Viktor took them all, standing, thin body shuddering with each hit, like a dance, like a perfectly choreographed series of movements and actions and reactions. Hit, sway, hit, sway, hit, fall.

When Viktor fell, Yuuri swore not a single soul drew a breath. It was silent, still, heavy.

He was still just as beautiful as he fell. A full collapse, body curling—he knew how to fall, though Yuuri had never heard of him doing it before.

The count.

One.

Two.

There was a twitch of movement, Viktor’s hand on the earth, shifting sand, pushing, and then nothing.

Three.

Phichit pulled Yuuri towards the exit. They couldn’t get caught on the way out. Might even have been worse than getting caught on the way in.

Yuuri wanted to see Viktor get back up.

They were circling around the back, climbing a set of dumpsters to get over the barbed fence that ran the length of the arena, when Yuuri caught sight of Viktor being led into a long black car, one of those older models that were popular with the owners. Sign of wealth.

Yuuri still isn’t sure what made him do it, but he swung his leg over the fence where Phichit was waiting on the other side, and, one leg on either side, he crowed, “Viktor! You’re beautiful!” And then he dropped down.

       

“We don’t have Japanese fighters,” the club manager says, scribbling on a notepad as he takes other fighters’ stats.  

“Well, now you do.”

“You’re kinda chubby, ain’t ya?”

Yuuri feels the man’s appraisal like hot wax. He touches fingertips to his stomach, presses them in, feels the give.

“I can lose it. Just give me a shot.”

The man shakes his head. “There’s no territory. You’d have to find a different territory to fight for. It’s unprecedented.”

“Then I’ll fight for here. For the US.”

The man snorts. “Can’t be serious. You’ll never get in the ring. Leo is the only fighter allowed to fight for US territory. Don’t you know anything?”

Yuuri starts to think maybe he doesn’t.

But he has to see Viktor again. He’s never seen anything more beautiful in his life than Viktor fighting.

“Get a coach, and you can fight,” the man says, shooing Yuuri from his office. “And get some contacts. Can’t wear glasses in the ring, pig boy.”

Phichit and Guang-hong have dragged Yuuri out to the bar. They aren’t supposed to go out past curfew. In their neighborhood, that’s 10. The kids call it the Small World Ghetto, because of that old Disney ride. The one with the rusty animatronics that sing about world peace. In reality, it’s the siphoned off area of town for the children of illegals, of the immigrants who were shipped off to work, fight, fuck, or serve.

Not many options, there.

Yuuri is swirling his murky beer around in the pint glass.

“I’m guessing they said no,” Guang-hong says, finishing off his own drink and wiping his mouth delicately with his sleeve.

“Not only did they say no,” Phichit chimes, “but the guy called him ‘pig boy.’”

Yuuri glances at Phichit, betrayed.

“He didn’t say no. He said if I get a coach from a territory, I’ll be in,” Yuuri corrects, finishing off his own drink.

Guang-hong glances around nervously. The bar is in a different neighborhood, bourgeois, mob-type folk. Lots of thick wool coats and leather boots. It was quiet, but the later the night wore on, the louder it always got, and the rougher the crowd. It’s where Yuuri learned to fight.

       

He’s seven beers in when someone shoves him to get to the bar, and six is usually about where Yuuri’s fists start tingling.

“Outta the way, Chubs,” the guy spits, elbowing Yuuri in the side.

Yuuri spins on his heel and grabs the man by the collar. He’s definitely a fighter. He’s got a wide, yellowing bruise from his jaw to his temple. Nasty thing.

“Should’a found me a beer ago,” Yuuri slurs a bit, before he takes a swing.

“Oh fuck,” Phichit says, rolling his eyes, grabbing his phone to document.

       

Yuuri learned to fight here. Here in the dank basement of an old gambling hall, his skin coated in humid condensed liquor and smoke.

Heat sears across Yuuri’s face.

He’s tipping back against the bar, knocking glasses over, bottles, cans, liquor spilling onto his sleeves.

Yuuri Katsuki is not, he should clarify, a good fighter.

But he fucking loves it.

He stands back up, fists raised, as two more blows hook on his chin, his jaw. He feels blood bubbling up in his mouth, pooling at the back of his throat, and he wants to spit like Viktor did.

The man laughs, grabs Yuuri by the ear, drags him forward.

“Little boy, you are in the wrong neighborhood,” he says, his accent thick. Italian? Greek? He’s tan like Phichit, but more of an olive color, less bronze.

Yuuri doesn’t know how to reply, so he just raises his fists again. He manages to get a kick to the man’s chest, pushing him back against a table. The patrons stand, alarmed, as if suddenly realizing a fight had broken out.

Yuuri looks to the corner, where Phichit is filming, and he offers a salute.

Yuuri swings his leg up, stumbling a bit due to the haze of drunken smog filling his skull, but the man easily catches it. With the man’s thick fingers wrapped around his ankle, Yuuri is lifted off the ground, swung a bit, and then dropped back against the row of bar stools.

He’s crawling out from the debris when the bells above the door ring out, and the room goes quiet.

“Holy fuck,” Yuuri hears Phichit hiss.

The man is fixing his shirt, wiping blood from the collar, where it had dripped from his split lip. It smears.

“Viktor, I thought you were headed home tonight,” the man says, cracking his neck, adjusting himself as if he hadn’t been struck or affected at all.

Viktor is staring right at Yuuri, where he’s on his hands and knees crawling back to the tables. His hair is short, more masculine, but still the same silver as when Yuuri saw him fight. Yuuri pictures Viktor lifting his curtain of hair up, tying it loosely, smiling down at him. Viktor, however, remains in place as he watches Yuri pick at a scab on his forearm. Maybe it was a splinter.

“I was,” Viktor replies, voice smooth and light, just as Yuuri knew it would be. “A fight?”

“Kid came after me. He’s just some dumb Ja--”

“I don’t need you to tell me what he is, Holden. I have eyes,” Viktor interrupts, walking over to kneel in front of Yuuri, who is still on hands and knees on the floor, his blood in a small pool on the ground in front of him. Yuuri nervously swirls his finger in it, staining the tip.

“Look at me, kid,” Viktor says, and he’s smiling.

He’s still smiling when Yuuri looks up, his eyes trained on Yuuri’s purpling cheek.

His eyes can’t be glass, Yuuri thinks. No it isn’t glass at all. It’s ice. Shattered ice. Kind of cloudy, stormy, dark, with light behind it.

“You in the rings?”

Yuuri wipes his nose, feeling blood trickling down over his upper lip. He sucks his lips into his mouth, lets the blood fill there instead. He shakes his head, unable to find a voice.

“Just fighting for the hell of it, then?” Viktor asks, and there’s something in his voice that could be curiosity or judgment.

Yuuri again has no voice, no answer. He opens his mouth.

Viktor reaches out, thumbs over Yuuri’s split lip, and the salt from the sweat on his finger makes it sting, the kind of pain that gets under your skin and sits there. Yuuri runs his tongue over the trail of Viktor’s finger, but the skin has already separated from the pressure of Viktor’s touch.

“You want to fight?”

“I want to fight like you.”

“You want to fight me or fight like me?”

Yuuri considers that a moment. He offers a small smile.

Viktor accepts it.

“You’re...eastern,” Viktor guesses.

“So are you,” Yuuri counters. “I’m just further east.”

“That you are,” Viktor replies, smirking a bit. “But you have no territory. No leader.”

“We’re both eastern, so who’s to care how far east I’m from?” Yuuri says, cracking his ripped knuckles. “I could be yours.”

Viktor lifts an eyebrow.

“From yours,” Yuuri amends, “territory, that is.”

“You’re terrible,” Viktor says, offering Yuuri his hand. It’s pristinely pale, though he has ragged pink scars along his knuckles and palm.

“I used to watch you,” Yuuri explains, pushing himself up to standing, refusing to touch Viktor’s clean, white hand. “My friends and I would sneak in the warehouse entrance, hide behind the boxes of liquor, and you were amazing, Viktor. You were untouchable.”

Viktor rubs at his jaw, feeling for nonexistent stubble.

“Until I wasn’t,” Viktor says, smiling again, but his eyes are dark, closed off, wary.

“I saw you lose, too,” Yuuri continues, “and it was the most...Viktor, Sir, I mean, you were the most magnificent loser I’d ever seen.”

Viktor barks out a laugh, and a few other patrons lingering nearby echo him.

“Magnificent loser?” he repeats, incredulous. “Kid, fighting is about winning.”

Yuuri considers that a moment, unsure. “I don’t think so. Fighting, I dunno, to me, it’s about the show. It’s about who the audience walks out talking about. You lost the match, but you won the audience’s favor.”

Viktor is still smiling condescendingly, but he does seem to take a minute or so to let Yuuri’s words sink in. “You think you could win their favor?”

Yuuri tilts his head to the left, the right, and back, hearing the satisfying sound of his vertebrae cracking. “Just like you did.”

 

Yuuri wakes up on the floor of Phichit’s dorm room, dust caking in his cuts, molding his hair into a sweaty, dusty helmet.

“Ah, you’re up, local hero,” Phichit says, scrolling through his phone, but there is a sneer in his voice.

“I feel like someone stomped on each individual bone in my body one at a time with really heavy boots,” Yuuri says, rubbing his tailbone, feeling the tell-tale sinking ache of a bruise.

“Do you also feel like someone, I don’t know, famous and deliciously hot, caressed your bloody face in the middle of a bar and exchanged witty repartee with you?” Phichit stands from his desk chair and moves to squat in front of Yuuri on the ground. “Do you feel like that, you lucky bastard?”

Yuuri does not, admittedly, feel like that. He honestly feels like his head is filled with cotton soaked in ethanol and expired juice. His mouth too. And also like all the bones in his body have been replaced with rusty pipes.

“No?” he ventures.

“Well, that’s what happened. Viktor fucking Nikiforov touched your face, and you had the nerve to ask him to let you fight, based on some principle of geography,” Phichit practically yells into Yuuri’s face.

“Did he say yes?” Yuuri actually does remember this, but he’s hoping feigning a blackout will make Phichit gloss over the more horrifically embarrassing bits.

Which, undoubtedly, was the wrong assumption.

“Not only did he not say yes, you ungrateful wretch, but he told you--to your face--that you were a terrible fighter. And then you got all high-horsey--as you do--and said you could fail beautifully or something, and Viktor--of course--saw through your bullshit and left,” Pichit rants, rubbing his face like those men on the sidewalk who mutter to themselves and drink from brown paper bags. “I can’t believe you were within reach of our childhood idol, and you...you _challenged_ him.”

“I did not.”

“You may as well have! You told him he lost ‘magnificently.’ Fighting isn’t poetry, you stupi--”

“Yuuri,” Guang-hong shrieks, bursting through the doorway, pale hands braced against the doorjamb. “Holy Bearded Gods, Yuuri Katsuki, Viktor is here.”

“Why would--why would Viktor be at the SW? And why are you only telling me?” Yuuri glances between his two friends, wondering if this is a practical joke, repayment for having to watch him, yet again, get his ass kicked in public.

Viktor comes up behind Guang-hong, pale fingers lightly touching his side, gently moving him aside.

“Yuuri, right?”

Yuuri is pretty sure he’s still dreaming. He’s still passed out on the dirt floor of Phichit’s room, still gathering mud into his open wounds, still dreaming about how Viktor’s eyes seemed like the slowly shattering surfaces of frozen ponds back home, the ones his parents would take him skating on before he slipped in and froze.

“Yuuri, Viktor is talking to you,” Phichit hisses, elbowing Yuuri in the side. It feels like a battering ram. Yuuri winces. Viktor notices, just a flicker as his eyes follow the movement of Phichit’s arm into Yuuri’s ribs.

“You want to fight,” Viktor asks, “right?”

At this moment, all Yuuri wants to do is stop time, trace the lines of Viktor’s face, maybe feel the soft, curving shell of his ear, and then go back to sleep. Viktor seems like he has wonderfully soft ears.

“Yeah,” Yuuri replies, “I want to fight.”

“You need a coach.”

Yuuri nods, and there’s this weird churning sensation in his stomach that has nothing to do with liquor or bile.

“I’m going to coach you,” Viktor says, spreading his arms wide, welcoming, like gates opening.

Not a question. Not a request. Not a demand. Just finality.

 

Viktor takes Yuuri to train in a part of town Yuuri had no idea even existed.

The buildings are all thick concrete or cinder block, painted over with crisp white paint. Few of the buildings have windows, and the ones that do only have maybe one-square-foot glass panels thirteen to fifteen feet above the ground.

“What is--”

“It’s Russian,” Viktor explains quickly.

“It’s very...minimalistic,” Yuuri says, struggling for a compliment.

“At least our territory has an embassy and housing,” Viktor counters, voice soft and silky, as if it weren’t an argument at all.

“Touche,” Yuuri replies, following Viktor into one of the smaller structures, windowless, wood floors and brick walls, again painted over with white.

“You want to fight?”

“You’ve asked me that already.”

“Just answer me.”

“I want to fight,” Yuuri says, petulant. Was Viktor not going to let him? After all that show of coming to the SW?

Viktor shrugs off his coat, some thick, expensive wool item, untangling his scarf from his neck.

“So fight,” he says coolly, stepping forward, hands at his sides.

“Right now? You?”

That churning from before, the guttural, visceral spinning of acids and what feels like stones in his abdomen starts back up, but this time there’s a smoky sensation traveling up from the base of his spine, one that feels good.

“Right now. Me.”

Viktor stands, waiting.

Yuuri shrugs off his own coat, some borrowed old leather thing that Guang-hong got him for his birthday last year. He drops it into a pile on the floor. He raises his fists.

“Well?”

Yuuri steps closer. He can smell some light, floral scent coming from Viktor’s skin.

“I thought you wanted to fight,” Viktor repeats, an edge to his voice.

“You’re going to fight back, right?”

“Hurry up.”

“You’re going to fight back, though?”

Viktor glances down at his watch, lips turning down, eyes narrowed.

The smoke has traveled up his spine, coiled around each vertebrae, sinking into his blood now, and it rises up into his throat, his mouth.

“I said fight back,” Yuuri says, teeth gritted, fist recoiling, aiming, arching--

Viktor catches his wrist mid-swing. Their eyes lock. Viktor’s knee comes up between Yuuri’s ribs, hard. Yuuri gags.

Viktor shoves Yuuri back, enough space for him to get a full kick in, his heel catching Yuuri across the jaw, and he spins to the side, collapsing onto his palms. The impact against the wood floor stings worse than the kick, reverberating up his arms like electric shocks.

“Fuck,” Yuuri spits, feeling blood pooling at the back of his mouth, warm and faintly bitter.

“You fall too hard. You need to learn to fall gracefully,” Viktor instructs. “Anticipate the fall, the parts of your body that will carry you down, and then the parts that will have to catch you. You never want to fall face-first unless you have no other options. The crowd wants to see your face as you fall.”

“Shouldn’t you be teaching me how not to get hit?”

“Yuuri, my dear, you’re going to get hit.”

He offers his hand.

 

Yuuri knows he still has weight to lose, but seeing his reflection in the locker room mirror at the training complex makes him feel a little more hopeful about his three weeks of training with Viktor.

Viktor is more patient than he appears. He’ll repeat instructions and demonstrate the movements, like a choreographer or a director. After each practice, Viktor takes Yuuri back to the lockers with a heavy metal toolbox filled with first aid. So far, nothing has really destroyed Yuuri beyond the basic ailments, skin tears, muscle bruising, sprains. There was a scare, once, when Viktor elbowed Yuuri in the face, and they both heard a soft _snap_. Luckily the swelling went down pretty quickly, though Viktor liked how the swollen, pinkish skin fit his “piggy” persona. Yuuri was not amused.

He has, however, realized that Viktor did not initially tell him that becoming his coach would mean he had left fighting forever. He didn’t realize that at all, stupidly enough.

“I was getting too old anyhow,” Viktor explains, dabbing at Yuuri’s arm with a cotton swab and some rubbing alcohol. It feels like napalm. That lingering, unending burn. Yuuri doesn’t know what napalm feels like, but he knows his family, back in Japan, have had some experiences with it in the past. _Experiences_ being a tremendous understatement.

Yuuri wonders briefly if Viktor’s family was also there during the War.

If they would have been on the same side.

He tosses that thought away as Viktor pulls out the needle.

“I don’t need stitches, Viktor, it isn’t that bad,” Yuuri says, about the crack that had grown on his bottom lip. He’d gotten used to the numbing sting of his scab reopening every time he ate or drank or spoke.

“It’s bleeding as you speak,” Viktor replies, sounding put-upon, shaking his head. He grabs Yuuri’s chin, fingers forcefully turning Yuuri towards him, thumb and forefinger spreading his lip into a line for the medical thread.

Yuuri looks away, training his gaze on the top of Viktor’s head.

“Why did you cut your hair,” Yuuri slurs as Viktor holds his mouth.

“Because no one took me seriously,” Viktor says, sliding the needle through the thin skin of Yuuri’s lip.

Yuuri’s eyes water. It feels like being bitten. Yuuri wonders how similar the two sensations are, as Viktor leans in to inspect the bleeding.

Viktor holds his chin tighter, fingers pressing in, bruising.

Yuuri feels tears on his cheekbones as Viktor threads his skin, sharp, pinching. If Viktor sees them, he doesn’t say anything.

The stitches tied off, Viktor closes the tool kit and sighs.

“You want to fight?”

Yuuri touches his finger lightly to his bottom lip, feeling the thin lines and little knot.

“Why do you keep asking me that?” Yuuri tries to form the words around the ache of his lip.

“You have a fight,” Viktor says, and he sounds almost apologetic.

“That’s amazing,” Yuuri replies, grabbing Viktor’s thighs, leaning excitedly into his space.

“You have to lose, Yuuri.”

“What? What do you mean? You think I don’t have a shot?” Yuuri’s voice cracks. He thought Viktor would at least have more faith in his training, if not in Yuuri. Viktor never wanted for self-confidence.

Viktor nips at the inside of his cheek, pulling the skin inward.

“No matter what, you want to fight, right?”

“Viktor, what’s going on? I told you; I want to fight; I’m going to fight,” Yuuri says, rising to his feet, swaying a bit as exhaustion strikes him in the gut.

Viktor grabs Yuuri’s hips, steers him in front of where he's seated on the bench, makes Yuuri look down at him as he speaks, his voice gentle and calm: “There’s something you need to know.” Viktor’s fingers trace the line where Yuuri’s sweatpants meet his t-shirt, slipping his warm skin over Yuuri’s hips. “The fights are planned, Yuuri.”

Yuuri begins shaking his head. “I don’t--I don’t understand?”

Viktor’s nails press into Yuuri’s hipbones, gripping in as if trying to rip his bones from his body. It’s a vaguely reassuring, comforting sensation, despite how aggressive it seems.

Yuuri leans into the touch, and Viktor continues, “Every match. Every fight. The territory leaders decide weeks ahead of time. The roster is drawn up based on who will make everyone the most money. Based on which territory has the most pull, the most influence. Leo, the US kid--he’s never going to lose, Yuuri. His family owns it all. We’re strangers in a strange land, and they will always remind us of that.”

“So,” Yuuri says, stepping away from Viktor’s hands, which hover in the air for a moment, devoid of skin to push against, before dropping, “what’s the point?”

“You love it, don’t you?”

“Yes, but if I’ll never win…”

“You said it yourself, didn’t you? You don’t have to win to win the audience.” Viktor’s hands reach out again, grabbing Yuuri by the hem of his shirt, dragging him forward. Or, that is to say, tugging lightly until Yuuri steps back into his space. “We can make you great, Yuuri. We can make them love you. They will pay to see you fall over and over.”

The way Viktor says it, reverently, as if he knows this from experience, though he only lost the one time. It sounds as if Viktor is saying that Yuuri is beautiful. In his failure. In his loss.

Yuuri kneels down, and Viktor cups Yuuri’s bruised jaw in his hands. He presses their foreheads together. “You don’t have to do it.”

There is something in way he says it.

“You can walk away. I won’t blame you.”

Viktor quit everything to become his coach. Why? Yuuri still has no idea.

He can feel Viktor’s breath on his lips. It’s hot and sweet and smells like black coffee and ginger.

“Do you want to fight, Yuuri? You’re going to get hurt. They’re going to hurt you. That part is real. You’re going to fall, Yuuri, do you understand? The fighting is real. Everything is real except the victory. In your case,  except the failure. Do you still want to fight, Yuuri? Do you?”

His lips are moving, but Yuuri can’t see. It’s like someone dropped a curtain of fog over his body, into his skull, into his blood. He can feel it filling up, slipping into his ear canals, down into his fingertips, his toes, pooling in his shoes.

“Do you?”

Yuuri grabs Viktor by the fringe, the soft strands of silver hair feeling coarser in his fingers than he anticipated, and he pulls Viktor forward. Viktor slides to the edge of the bench, caught off guard, hands bracing on Yuuri’s shoulders, where his fingers find purchase fisting into Yuuri’s shirt.

“They’re going to love me,” Yuuri murmurs, leaning in closely, lips brushing Viktor’s with every word.

Viktor’s eyes light up, lightning behind the ice.

“You won't be able to look away.”


	2. I came to fight, I am in the air

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yuri faces off against his ex, his desires, and his generally vanilla best friend/lover.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey again, friends. I swore to myself I wouldn't post this until I had the next few chapters written, but I've gotten such nice comments, and also I am a procrastinator, so I think having to throw more chapters together will make me actually do it. I am going to expound on the universe a bit more in the chapters to come, but for now I am mostly establishing characters. Anyhow, here is the first bit of porn. Just so you all don't freak out, Yurio is of age to consent in this AU. Here is his first chapter, featuring my favorite pairings of YoI.

 

Yuri's POV:

Yuri hates the way he stands. 

He hates the way his huge, pale hands look as he wraps them in thick white tape. 

He even hates the way the muscles under JJ’s skin--his calves--contract when JJ hops in place like some fool. 

Otabek offers Yuri a water, a bit murky, in a plastic cup. Yuri takes the water into his mouth, swishes it around, and spits at his feet. 

“That was for drinking,” Otabek says, as if Yuri didn’t know. 

“Can’t have anything in my stomach. You know he goes for me there.”

Yuri can still feel the ghost touch of the impact from JJ’s shin across his abdomen, when JJ had caught him off guard. JJ has a way of doing that. 

“Remember,” Otabek murmurs, a warm, tan hand coming to rest on Yuri’s shoulder, “he’s--”

“I know.” 

Yuri glances across the ring, where JJ is listening to his coach, nodding occasionally, grinning like he’s being force-fed hilarious jokes. 

But his eyes are on Yuri. 

Yuri wants to dig his eyes out with a spoon and shove them up his asshole. 

JJ offers a small wave.

Yuri pictures himself jumping across the ring and gnawing at JJ’s wrist until his teeth hit JJ’s ulna. 

The bell rings. 

Otabek pats Yuri lightly on the head, as he does before every fight, before he steps back to where the other bouncers are on the sidelines, ready to intervene if the crowd swarms into the ring or if the fight turns sour--more sour than fans appreciate.

Yuri moves quickly. No one pays money to watch the two fighters dawdle about and make small talk, though Yuri knows JJ would if given the chance. 

Yuri is across the ring before JJ’s feet have time to shift, and he’s fisting his hands in JJ’s shirt, pulling him down to eye-level, before jamming his knee up into JJ’s chin. 

JJ reels backwards, fingers massaging his chin. 

“Alright, kitten,” JJ says, moving his jaw around. 

Yuri hates that JJ still uses his nickname, in front of all these people. As if it is a taunt. 

Yuri sprints forward again, but JJ catches him when he tries to get a fist near JJ’s eye. JJ’s grip is rough, bruising, and he uses Yuri’s own weight to trip him onto his back. 

JJ drops down over him, knees pinning Yuri’s thighs down to the dirt. 

Yuri swings wildly, but JJ has hold of his wrists. 

Yuri knows this should be the end.

JJ already has the victory, but Yuri can never let it be so easy.

He runs his tongue along his bottom lip.

JJ’s eyes follow the movement. 

“JJ, can I ask you something?” Yuri says, voice soft, calm.

JJ leans down, hovering over Yuri’s face, their noses brushing, his breath hot and bitter. 

“Yes, kitten?”

Yuri spits.

JJ recoils, wiping frantically at his face, and Yuri takes the opportunity to switch their positions.

He grabs JJ by the throat and throws his whole body down to pin JJ to the dirt floor. 

“Don’t call me kitten. Don’t smile at me. Don’t even fucking make eye contact. You may have this fight, but I will not hand it to you like everything else you get on a silver platter, you egotistical...maple leaf,” Yuri slurs, throwing punches at JJ’s face between every few words, uncaring that the bouncers on the sidelines have swarmed around the ring, ready to intervene.

JJ bucks his body upwards, trying to dislodge Yuri, but he holds on to JJ’s shirt. Yuri could feel JJ’s body against him, and he fought the familiar urge to press himself closer. 

JJ still smelled like sweat and sugar. 

“Don’t be so crass, Yuri, the fans will hear you,” JJ says, grabbing Yuri’s wrists again to stop his barrage of hits. 

“They don’t care. They just want to see somebody piss blood.”

“You know I don’t do fluids,” JJ replies, grimacing.

Yuri grits his teeth and growls, a guttural, miserable sound that gets trapped in his throat. “Just throw me off and be done with it. I won’t get up. It isn’t worth it.”

JJ’s hips move up again, but it is teasing again. Yuri could easily press him back down, which he does. But there is no mistaking it.

JJ is hard.

Yuri gets his knee between JJ’s thighs, pushing down against his body. “Don’t fucking touch me with that.”

JJ actually flushes, turning his head away towards the crowd.

“Don’t act like you aren’t,” JJ mutters, the words almost drowned out by the sound of the crowd howling for someone to make a move.

“I’m not, you sick fuck. Just hit me and make it real,” Yuri crows, ripping his hands from JJ’s grip and moving to hold his forearms against JJ’s throat until his windpipe is blocked.

JJ blinks up at him for a moment, pupils blown wide. 

Yuri doesn’t let himself look, just leans down harder, using all his weight, listening to the garbled sounds of JJ struggling for air. 

JJ hooks his legs around Yuri’s waist, and Yuri barely has any time to register the motion in his brain before he’s flat on his back again. JJ gets a hit across Yuri’s cheek, but the impact stretches up to his temple. His skull is ringing like a hollow cave echo. His vision blurs. 

JJ gets up to his feet and presses the sole of his shoe against Yuri’s chest.

The crowd roars. JJ throws up his group’s sign, and the cheers grow louder. 

Yuri feels sick.

And not just because his brain might be bruised or leaking or something--he doesn’t know; he leaves the medical shit to Otabek. 

But because there is that ache between his thighs again. Because he can still feel JJ’s hips against his own. Because JJ had to use that name again. Because when Yuri closes his eyes at the end of the fight, his head swimming and vision going black, he swears he can hear JJ ask, ‘he’ll be alright, right?’

 

Yuri wakes up on Otabek’s cot, wrapped warmly in some kind of bright yellow knit blanket. He tries to struggle out of it, but Otabek had coiled it around him like pierogi skin. 

The radio is playing. Otabek is one of the only people Yuri knows who bothers with them. It picks up mostly white noise, but sometimes there will be the occasional classical music broadcast from one of the territories with actual satellite transference. Right now there’s some light piano, with the sounds of Otabek pouring hot water out into a mug. 

“You really shouldn’t egg him on,” Otabek says finally, moving to the side of the cot to hand Yuri a mug of hot honey water. “No caffeine,” he adds, when Yuri grimaces at it.

“I’m fine,” Yuri defends, trying again to sit up. 

“I know you hate losing,” Otabek continues, “but it isn’t worth it. Your fans don’t want to see you flopping around the ring like a cowboy.”

“Like a what?”

“Like someone who rides a horse,” Otabek sighs, shaking his head. “I know he gets under your skin, but--”

“He does not,” Yuri hisses, “get under anything of the sort.”

Otabek takes the mug away from Yuri as he writhes in complaint, keeping the ceramic still to keep it from spilling. 

“I’ve seen you fight every match for the last two years, Yuri. I know who does and doesn’t piss you off,” Otabek explains. “I get it. He’s cocky. He’s conventionally handsome--”

“He’s no more or less handsome than you are,” Yuri says, unconsciously adding the ‘or less.’ 

Otabek tucks his hands under Yuri’s armpits and helps him to sit up against the brick wall behind the cot. Yuri lets him, his body loose and drained like a hollow doll. 

“Yuri,” Otabek says, and Yuri keeps hearing  _ kitten _ . 

“What?” Yuri snaps.

“They schedule you to lose because they know it’ll break you. Your rebellion was endearing to them at the beginning, but I’ve heard whispers, and endearment only lasts so long. If you want to fight--”

“I  _ have _ to fight.”

“If you want to fight, you have to play by their rules,” Otabek finishes, ignoring Yuri’s interruption. He traces the bruises that line Yuri’s wrists, purples fading to yellows at the edges, with a bit of greenish brown thrown in. 

“Viktor didn’t play by the rules,” Yuri argues, practically pouting, but also very much enjoying the feeling of Otabek’s rough fingers on his skin. 

“Viktor didn’t have to. His family helped make them.”

Yuri grabs Otabek’s hands, bringing one of them to his lips. 

“Stop all this sensitive crap,” Yuri murmurs, lips parting to take Otabek’s fingers into his mouth. “I lost a fight; shouldn’t you be consoling me?”

“When have you ever needed consolation?” Otabek chuckles, eyes trained on the deep pink of Yuri’s tongue as it laps at the underside of his middle finger. 

“That’s true. You’re probably the one in need of comfort, having to watch your little toy getting throttled all the time,” Yuri says casually, leaning forward to press the heel of his palm against the front of Otabek’s jeans. 

Otabek draws in a short, sharp breath.

Yuri kisses the tip of his pointer finger and then places it back on Otabek’s thigh. 

“Yuri, your brain was just rattled against your skull; I don’t think we should--”

Yuri crawls out from the blankets and up into Otabek’s lap, straddling his waist. 

“I’ve had a bad day,” Yuri says, noting the way his eyes struggle to stay open and his muscles seem to be delayed in their response to his desire to move. 

“You’re not a toy,” Otabek replies, mouth a hard line.

Yuri dips his head down to press kisses along Otabek’s jawline. It’s sharper than JJ’s, more masculine. He can grow stubble, unlike JJ. JJ used to stand in front of the mirror in the locker rooms after they’d fucked, appraising his lack of facial hair for hours. 

“What if I want to be?” Yuri counters, tongue tracing the lobe of Otabek’s ear, nipping the skin gently. Otabek didn’t like pain the way Yuri did. The way JJ did. Didn’t crave it like them.

Otabek’s gaze darkens, and he sets his jaw in a hard line. 

He grabs Yuri around the waist with one arm, tossing him onto his hands and knees on the sheets. Yuri makes a show of struggling, gripping the sheets in his small hands and arching backwards, but Otabek knows it’s a game to him. Yuri tries to crawl away, but Otabek grabs him by the ankles and drags him back.

Heat coils around Yuri’s body. His breath starts coming faster. Otabek doesn’t hurt him the way JJ--

Otabek doesn’t  _ hurt  _ him, but Otabek gives him what he wants. 

A threat. Anticipation. 

Otabek tears Yuri’s sweats down to his shins and pushes him belly-down to the mattress. Yuri struggles weakly--partially because he doesn’t want to struggle and partially because his brain had just been rattled in his skull. Otabek holds him with a firm palm against his tailbone. 

“You’re not a toy,” Otabek insists, and Yuri almost lets that kill the mood, but then Otabek slaps him across the back of his thighs, at the cusp of his ass, and  _ God _ , he’s never done that before. 

“Again,” Yuri says, wriggling beneath Otabek’s hands, one holding him captive against the sheets, the other roaming over the splotch of pink he’d formed on Yuri’s skin.

“You’re not,” Otabek says again, louder, more of a growl, “a toy.” And he repeats the motion, a bit higher up, marking Yuri’s skin with pink palms. 

Yuri yelps, bucking up into the sensation. This is something JJ had never done. Pain actually for the purpose of pleasure, as opposed to pain coincidentally causing it. 

“You’re right,” Yuri says, breath coming in harsh pants now, as he ruts against the rough flannel of the sheets. It isn’t the most pleasant of sensations, but Yuri is too turned on by the numbing sting of his skin as Otabek holds him steady, prepares him for more strikes. 

“I’m right?” Otabek says, sounding confused for a moment.

Yuri takes the opportunity to slip out from under the hand pressing him down, and he darts across the room, abandoning his sweat pants along the way. 

“Yeah,” Yuri replies, tossing the words over his shoulder as he also tosses his shirt in Otabek’s direction. “I fight.”

Otabek watches him move for a few beats of silence, and Yuri worries he’s done something wrong. Killed the mood. But he seemed…

He seemed different, just then.

More like him.

More like  _ him _ .

Otabek steps forward, and it isn’t the hesitant step of someone who’s confused.

It’s the step Yuri had seen while watching videos of jaguars as a child, back when he realized they were just big cats and not some otherworldly monstrous creatures. It’s the step predators take while they appraise the distance between themselves and prey, waiting for the first twitch of movement.

Yuri runs his hands over his own body. He’s never felt particularly sexy before, never felt the inclination to show off. He knows he’s no eros. He’s not even an aphrodite. He has no idea what makes him sexy, what makes anyone sexy.

But he knows what adrenaline looks like when it is coursing through someone. Otabek’s fringe hanging with sweat over his eyes, his chest more prominently rising and falling with heavier breaths, his gaze more focused. 

Yuri side steps towards the kitchen, and Otabek finally gives chase. 

Yuri had no idea he was fast. He supposes to be a bouncer for a roster of overly aggressive fighters, you have to be able to catch them first. 

And Yuri is caught embarrassingly quick. He’s just entered the kitchen when he realizes he’s trapped. Even though his brain knows the chase is fake, just a game, his body is still thrumming with adrenaline, and he swings his arms out against the threat, trying to stave it off, even though he craves it. 

Otabek has him up against the cabinets in seconds, spreading his legs where they hang over the edge of the countertop, and slipping his hand between them. Yuri gasps, head falling back against the wood of the cabinets, eyelids fluttering. 

“Fuck,”  he breathes out, still gasping from the shock.

Otabek’s strokes are rougher than normal, his hand a tight fist. He leans in to kiss Yuri’s throat, but his teeth sink in, and he’s marking him--

Oh God, he’s marking him.

Yuri feels a swell of pride and also terror, and his hips keep rising up into Otabek’s grip as Otabek just stands there watching like a vulture.

“You like this,” Yuri pants out.

Otabek doesn’t reply, just shifts Yuri’s position forward and slips two slick fingers between Yuri’s thighs. Yuri cries out, hands scrabbling against the old plastic countertops. 

“You fucking love this,” Yuri cooes, feeling almost triumphant.

Otabek just continues working Yuri open until he’s decided it’s enough, which is about three minutes later than Yuri decided he was ready.

Even when discovering his sadomasochism, Otabek was still careful.

Yuri smiles weakly to himself as Otabek fucks into him at once, which is probably why he’d been so careful. Yuri had never taken him in so quickly, so completely at once. It’s overwhelming. Like after taking a line of shots--the moment when the liquor finally hits, and everything is too much: speech, movement, thought.

Yuri can hear his own cries ringing in his ears, and they sound far away. This is, again, probably from the brain-skull-rattling, but he doesn’t have time to think about that.

This kind of fuck feels familiar. It feels right.

Otabek’s hands are wrapped tightly at Yuri’s hips, pressing in as if Yuri’s skin were sand. And he just keeps rutting into Yuri, silent save for the sound of his ragged breathing.

_ He _ was a talker. Always. They both were. Always talking. Arguing. Fighting.

Otabek doesn’t give Yuri much of a chance to argue. He’s holding his body so tightly, fucking him like he’s a prize he’s won, like Otabek  _ earned _ him, and Yuri has never once thought he was something worth earning. 

Otabek wraps one of his hands back around Yuri’s cock, and that’s when Yuri just about blacks out.

He’s screaming. He knows he is. He used to get in trouble for being a screamer. That’s what JJ called it. ‘A screamer.’

_ Better than being a groaner. Like a fog horn.  _

Yuri can feel Otabek’s lips against his collarbone, his teeth biting into the groove, and then the last thing he feels is Otabek spilling out inside him, and it’s hot and full and strange; no one has ever come inside him before, always pulling out to come onto his skin. 

And then Yuri collapses. 

 

When he comes to, Otabek isn’t in the room. He remembers that Otabek works weekday nights now, when the lower-string fighters have matches.

He tries to sit up, but his body is aching, and his skull feels like it’s made of fur. 

His phone buzzes on the floor beside the cot. Yuri doesn’t remember it falling off the edge, but then again, Yuri also doesn’t remember much beyond the satisfying burn between his legs and the remnants of fear still lodged in his chest. 

[Jerkface Jerkoff 10:56 p.m.]: are you ok?

[Jerkface Jerkoff 10:56 p.m.]: i hit you too hard

[Jerkface Jerkoff 10:57 p.m.]: you don’t have to say anything just tell me you’re ok

[Yuri 10:58 p.m.]: go fuck yourself

[Jerkface Jerkoff 10:58 p.m.] that’s my kitten

Yuri throws his phone across the room, and the screen shatters, splitting in a web like a footstep on melting ice.

His hands are shaking, and he tries to hold onto the sheets to steady himself. 

Yuri was nobody’s anything.

Not Otabek’s toy.

Not JJ’s kitten. 

Not anybody’s. 


	3. We rejoice cause the hurting is so painless

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yuuri sees Yuri fight for the first time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey again y'all. I know I've missed replying to some of your comments, but I'm going to work on getting to them! Please continue reading, kudo-ing, and commenting because I love, love, love you all! Here is chapter 3, with more Yuuri and Viktor. Just so you know there is some minor knife-play and blood-play here (but it isn't really sexual...just happens), so if that isn't your thing, feel free to skip this chapter, though this fic is about violence so--  
> Also this chapter has not been beta-ed unlike the other two, so forgive any errors! Enjoy!

Yuuri's POV:

 

Yuuri is glancing down at his phone when Viktor comes into the room with two mugs of coffee. 

“Sugar?”

Viktor raises his eyebrows.

Yuuri takes the cup and peers down into the hot, brown bean water. 

“It’s just hot bean water,” he says sorrowfully. 

“As it should be. Sugar fucks with your natural endorphins,” Viktor replies, patting Yuuri’s bare knee. 

Yuuri grabs Viktor’s hand and holds it tight against his skin. “Are you going to tell me about the fight now?”

Viktor sighs and places his own mug down on the bench. “The kid is not going to go easy on you just because he’s picked to win.”

“Who is he? Viktor, come on. It isn’t like I’m going to cry or something,” Yuuri says. 

Viktor scratches above his eyebrow. “The Plisetski kid. The other Yuri.”

“The teeny blond kid?”

“The same.”

“I’ve never seen him fight.”

Viktor gives Yuuri something like a cross between a wince and a smile. Not quite a grimace. 

“Would you like to?”

 

Yuri Plisetski can’t be more than 162 centimeters. His waist is the width of Yuuri’s pickle jar at home. He has bandages on his palms, wrists, knees, waist, feet. He only wears a loose-fitting pair of shorts, hanging low on his sharp hipbones. 

His opponent is some Italian kid, Michele Crispino, popular with the crowd for his looks. The American crowd tends to favor the boys with height, some muscle--but not too much--dark eyes, brown skin--but, again, not  _ too  _ brown.

“The crowd is fickle,” Viktor explains, watching as Michele signs autographs, slips of paper handed to him from frantically waving hands in the audience. From this distance, the crowd looks like a pit of black with unattached limbs waggling in the air above it.  “They love him, but they also loved to watch some Indian kid crack his skull open last weekend.”

“That’s the game, isn’t it?”

Viktor shifts his gaze down to Yuuri’s face, one corner of his lips twitching. “Will you still see it as a game, I wonder, after your first fight?”

Yuuri sets his lips into a flat grimace and turns back to the ring. Fighting has always been a game. If there are winners and there are losers, then it can only be a game. 

“Now watch Yuri closely,” Viktor says.

“That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

Viktor casts another glare in Yuuri’s direction. Yuuri’s mouth clamps shut.

“The other fighter is flashier, but Yuri is Russian.”

Yuuri wrinkles his nose. “What does that even mean?”

Viktor lays a heavy arm around Yuuri’s shoulders. “It means he gets shit done.”

Yuuri wants to reply with a snippy remark about how his people get shit done too, but he sees it isn’t worth it when the bell rings. 

Michele crosses the ring, kicking up dirt, catching his leg behind Yuri’s knees. Yuri goes down onto his knees as if in prayer, no other part of him touching the ring floor. Just a split second later, he’s back up, shaking the dirt from his skin with a roundhouse kick, his shin hooking beneath Michele’s jaw. 

Viktor was right. The crowd loves Michele, but the thing the crowd loves the most about him is how stunning he is as he wipes at the dirt left behind from Yuri’s kick at the place where his blood vessels ruptured in purple and black and green. 

Viktor was also right that Yuri is Russian. Well, what Viktor means when he says that. 

Yuri is fast and efficient. His limbs move as if he'd rehearsed it all, though Yuuri knows there is no way to rehearse reactions as fluid and powerful as Yuri’s.

“He’s like a robot,” Yuuri observes, watching as Yuri grabs Michele by the throat with his tiny pale hands. “Unflinching.”

Yuri’s lips are curled over his teeth, a sneer, as he throws Michele to the ground and clambers his tiny frame over him. 

“I was there for his first day,” Viktor says, eyes not leaving the match. The lights above the ring cast severe shadows over Viktor’s face, his skin a clean white canvas for the harsh yellow bulbs. 

“And was he always this…” Yuuri trails off, watching as the other Yuri thrusts his thumbs into Michele’s eye sockets. 

“No, actually. He was a sweet kid. Always followed me around. Carried around this raggedy old plush cat, some big white fluff ball with torn ears and button eyes.”

Yuuri tries to picture the vicious tiny beast currently carving lines down Michele’s throat toting around a stuffed kitten, and it does not mesh as a visual. 

“Are you sure it was a plush toy and not his feline devil spawn?”

Viktor rolls his eyes and grabs Yuuri’s cheeks, steering his face back to the match. 

“Watch him, or I’ll make your official fighting name PigBoy.”

“You wouldn’t, and also that isn’t a thing,” Yuuri replies, snorting. “Fighting name.”

In the ring, Michele is slamming his hand down into the dirt repeatedly, but the referee doesn’t seem to be caring. The audience is too loud, too terrified, too exhilarated. 

One of the larger kids on the edge of the ring, one of the bouncers, rushes into the ring and grabs Yuri from behind, his grip tight on Yuri’s forearms. Yuri goes up into the air, leaning back into the thick wall of muscle behind him, his little legs kicking out in front of him, trying to knock the bouncer off balance. Yuri is writhing in the boy’s grip, screaming, his hands bloody and shaking. 

A girl from the crowd drops down beside Michele on the floor of the ring, patting his cheeks, screeching into his face, her dark hair like a curtain between the two of them and the crowd. 

The crowd doesn’t seem to care one bit about Michele on the floor. It’s chanting Yuri’s name like it’s the only word its collective lips can even form, the words all melding into one awed and horrified din. 

“That’s his sister,” Viktor says, leaning in close to murmur the words into Yuuri’s ear. His breath is like heavy July air in the SW dorms, when the humidity condensates on the inside of Yuuri’s door, so much that when he touches the handle in the morning, his fingers drip rain onto the floor. 

“They look very, uh, close,” Yuuri observes, watching as Michele’s sister cradles her brother in her lap and brushes blood from his lips. 

“Probably an Italian thing,” Viktor says offhandedly, grabbing Yuuri and pulling him away. Viktor’s hand is warm and slippery with sweat around Yuuri’s wrist as he drags Yuuri towards the locker rooms. 

“Viktor, I didn’t fight, I don’t think we should--”

Viktor shushes him with a palm over Yuuri’s mouth. Viktor holds Yuuri from behind, one arm around his waist. Yuuri breathes heavily through his nose behind Viktor’s hand. He can feel Viktor’s heat moving through his own veins, as if their bodies were connected through his spine. 

“He’s probably in here with his coach,” Viktor whispers, pointing the pinky of the hand wrapped around Yuuri’s lips towards the doorway to the locker room. “Do you think he’s celebrating?”

Yuuri hears a soft sound from around the corner, where the rows of solid wooden benches sit between the metal lockers and the showers. It sounds like a sob, like a broken, guttural sound. Like choking. Like retching. 

“You could have killed him.” The voice isn’t Yuri’s. It’s much too deep. Though Yuuri could be mistaken. 

There is no reply. Only another hiccuping, miserable whine that sounds as if it’s being emitted from a lost child without speech capability. 

“You could have killed yourself,” the voice adds, and it’s gruffer than before, strained. 

Again no answer. 

“Ah,” Viktor says softly, his lips close to the shell of Yuuri’s ear. “He  _ is  _ celebrating.”

“Yuri.”

Yuuri swears it’s Viktor’s voice, wants to turn around in Viktor’s arms, needs to hear Viktor speak his name so desperately. Like a swear uttered under his breath. 

Viktor steps forward, jostling Yuuri until he stumbles into the open doorway of the locker room. 

Yuuri draws in a sharp breath. 

The bouncer from before has his back pressed to the cool metal of the gray lockers, with Yuri on his knees in front of him. Yuri’s soft blond hair is clenched tightly in the bouncer’s fists as his hips buck forward, fucking himself into Yuri’s little pink mouth. 

They don’t notice Yuuri at all. 

There are tears running in little streams down Yuri’s cheeks as he gags, his cheeks red and lips stretched miserably around the bouncer’s--Otabek, Yuuri remembers--cock. 

“Don’t ever--” Otabek breaks off, groaning weakly, “Don’t  _ ever _ \--” 

Yuuri backs up into Viktor’s chest, and Viktor winds his arms around Yuuri’s waist, drawing him away. 

“That was unexpected,” Viktor says, laughing like a child who harbors a wicked secret. 

Yuuri is shaking, his palms coated in clammy sweat, his heart hammering as if it were shivering. 

“Yuuri,” Viktor says, cupping Yuuri’s cheeks, “Yuuri.”

“He was crying,” Yuuri finally replies, his voice the barest of whispers. 

Viktor sighs and pulls Yuuri along into a practice room, locking the door behind them. “Yuuri, he’s an adult. He may look young, but Yuri Plisetski doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to.”

Yuuri feels tears prickling behind his own eyes, like someone were cracking ice behind his eyeballs, trying to get the chilled water to gush forth. He tries to focus on winding gauze around his hands, but his hands are still shaking.

“Yuuri, what is this about?” Viktor asks, pulling the deep red and black practice pads over his hands and holding them up. 

Yuuri doesn’t ask, just clenches and unclenches his fists for a few moments before beginning to throw punches at the pads Viktor holds in front of him. He starts off soft, still shaken, still thinking about little Yuri Plisetski still covered in Michele’s blood, one hand wrapped around Otabek’s thigh, the other around his own cock. 

The more he thinks about it, the more force he puts into his strikes. Viktor holds still, letting the hits rock him back on his heels, his expression impassive. 

“Why do they like him?” Yuuri grits out, arms beginning to ache in that familiar, soothing way that spreads up from his knuckles to his back. Viktor calls those wide, spreading muscles in his back his ‘angel wings.’ 

“Yuri?” Viktor replies, starting to push back against Yuuri’s punches with the thick practice pads. “Harder.”

“Yeah,” Yuuri says, the image of Yuri with Michele’s blood still under his nails as he takes Otabek deep into his throat making his knees nearly buckle, and he has no idea why. He’s seen sex before, knows what it looks like. A dorm of hungry, bored kids with no parents, no adult, no future--of course he’s seen sex before. He punches harder. Viktor shifts more onto his back foot, bracing as Yuuri’s punches sink deeper into the foam padding. 

“They like him because he’s smart. He’s brutally smart. Or mostly just brutal.”

Yuuri feels a weak growl rising up like bile in his chest. 

Viktor drops the pads to the floor. “Yuuri, why do you fight?” 

Yuuri drops down into a squat, forearms around his shins, forehead resting on his kneecaps. He murmurs into the space between his knees, “I don’t know. It makes everything feel okay.”

Viktor lowers himself down, taps under Yuuri’s chin until he looks up. When Yuuri refuses to make eye contact, Viktor taps under his chin again. “Everything, what? Everything physically? Emotionally? Spiritually?”

“Everything. Everything me. It makes everything me feel right,” Yuuri explains, feeling shaken, as if his gravitational connection to the earth has lessened. 

“Tell me about your family, Yuuri,” Viktor says. Not a question. “Tell me about Japan.”

Yuuri drops back onto his tailbone, flopping until he’s lying down on the floor, staring up at the cement ceiling. Viktor lies back with him, hand outstretched towards Yuuri’s, just the tips of their fingers brushing. 

“There isn’t much to tell. I wasn’t there for very long. My parents owned a bath house, something for the tourists, though many stopped coming once travel got excessively expensive. Tourism also just isn’t really an industry over there anymore. If you don’t make something, you don’t make money. It’s all production, and all we produced was hot water,” Yuuri says, feeling Viktor tapping at his fingers like piano keys, playing some unheard music against Yuuri’s skin. 

“What was it like before?” 

Yuuri’s skull rocks in little side-to-side motions against the floor. He shuts his eyes and thinks of home. The home before this home. “It was warm. Not just because of the water, of course. Because my parents were warm people. Everybody knew them, everybody liked them, everybody wanted to be around them. They made dinners for the whole town it seemed like, sometimes.” Yuuri knows tears are leaking from the corners of his eyes, but he makes no move to wipe them. “I’m an only child, but after a while they couldn’t even support just having me. I’d hear them talking about where they could pull money from, and then they’d act like they hadn’t said anything if I walked in. It was frustrating. I was a kid, you know, like ten, but even a kid knows when he’s being talked about. You can sense it, like a sneeze, that’s what we used to say.”

“Like a sneeze,” Viktor repeats, amused, still drumming his fingertips lightly against Yuuri’s on the floor. 

“Yeah. You feel it forming like a cloud over your brain, in your sinuses, and then it all builds up and connects and comes together and then it’s over,” Yuuri says. “I didn’t want it to be one of those violent, aggressive sneezes, so I asked my friends about how I could get shipped here instead.”

“Found a recruiter?” Viktor turns his head, cheek against the floor, to look at Yuuri. Yuuri does the same. 

“Yeah. He was an American. Traveled to a bunch of countries around Asia to look for families on hard times, looking to send their kids to a ‘better future.’ He was nice. Said I could just apply for housing at the SW--er, immigrant--dorms with the other kids, and I’d hear quickly. Didn’t even take three days.”

Viktor nods, probably quite aware of how the system for kids like Yuuri works. 

“They set me up with a job when I arrived, moving crates down at the pier. I was a bigger kid, you know, ‘chubby’ or whatever,” he says, making air quotes, “so they figured I was strong. I wasn’t, really, but I got stronger. I had some friends, too, other kids who found their way to the dorms from countries who couldn’t support a new generation after travel bans or resource cuts. We were human capital. The best new kind of import.”

“And the fighting?” 

Viktor’s face looks like it’s split in two. One side exposed to the overhead lamps, glowing white under the light and the other dark, his skin soft against the rough hard floor. Yuuri wants to reach out and tuck his hand under Viktor’s cheek so his flesh isn’t dirtied. 

“I wanted to stand out. I wanted to feel power,” Yuuri murmurs, as if finally acknowledging these words as true. “Power is the only way to be seen. I wasn’t just some aimless servant, completing chores to stay alive. I was living.”

Viktor sits up a little, moving to Yuuri’s side, leaning down over Yuuri’s face. “And now? Do you feel powerful?”

Yuuri shakes his head. “I see kids like Plisetski, and I think...it’s an illusion. He’s in that ring pummeling some kid one second, cheered on, and you think--man, that kid made something of himself, he’s got the power to...to destroy, and the next second he’s--” Yuuri flushes. “He’s on his knees for a damn bouncer, gagging.”

“And you think that makes him less powerful?” Viktor counters, seeming genuinely curious. There’s something in his gaze that makes Yuuri think he’s been waiting for this conversation. They’re bright, intent, like they always were when he fought.

“Well doesn’t it?” Yuuri sits up, and Viktor follows suit, sitting across from him, their knees touching. 

“Do you feel less powerful when I beat you in practice?” Viktor asks, hands on Yuuri’s thighs, leaning into Yuuri’s space. 

“No, but that’s different. You still praise me when I lose. The crowd still praises the loser in the ring if it got a good show,” Yuuri answers, shaking his head slowly.

“What if Yuri Plisetski let himself surrender in the same way he would in a fight?” 

Yuuri thinks back to the first time Phichit pulled him up from the dirt after a lost fight. Some kid in the dorms called Yuuri a  _ chink _ , which was neither true nor clever, and it made Yuuri feel like he’d been slowly exposed and lacerated raw with a potato peeler. So he hit the kid. And moments later he was face first in fresh mud outside his dorm building. 

For the split second after that first retaliation hit, Yuuri swore his mind went blank. Not blank as in empty. Empty as a concept always felt cold to Yuuri. Cold and dark. It was more like...that feeling during the winter in his hometown, when Yuuri would step out to the bath. Behind him the lodge was warm, in front of him the air was chilled, but he could feel the steam from the waters also. So it was almost like he felt nothing at all. He just...was. And there was something so liberating about all that nothingness. 

“Surrendering is different from losing,” Yuuri says after a moment. 

Viktor nods, one corner of his lips lifting up in a grin. “That’s right.”

“But why would someone as vicious and competitive as Yuri Plisetski choose to surrender like that? I mean, it looked like he was…”

“What?”

Yuuri looks down at Viktor’s hands on his thighs. They’re actually smaller hands than he’d expected. Delicate in a way Yuuri’s weren’t. Crossed with raised lines of scars. Yuuri feels as if he can sense Viktor’s pulse against his skin, steady and strong.

“He was crying,” Yuuri says, running his tongue along his bottom lip, feeling for the now-removed stitches. 

“That fight you saw me lose,” Viktor says, “do you want to know what happened after?”

Yuuri looks up again, eyes wide, hands gripping into fists. He nods. 

“I went into the locker room and cried.” Viktor’s gaze is steady, though it sounds like he’s never told this story before. Yuuri can tell by the way Viktor’s speech, normally so fluid, nearly accent-less like the speech of the rich white men who drink in the bars further down the dimly-lit road of the bar, becomes more stilted, as if he has to consult his mental translator to remember the words for what occurred. 

“I mean, that’s perfectly reasonable, Viktor, you had never--”

“No, Yuuri, you don’t see. You don’t...understand. It was--” He waves his hand around in the air, as if trying to pull the words into himself. “Relief. It was--” He draws in a slow breath. “I had expected to grieve, when in reality I hadn’t lost anything.”

“I mean you lost the match--”

“No, Yuuri. I felt free. There was nothing to grieve. Just like you said, loss isn’t the same as surrender. When you think about the pain as something given to you, something you accept, take gratefully, it isn’t bad. It isn’t bad at all,” Viktor explains. 

“It still hurts, doesn’t it?”

“Of course it still hurts. But if I asked you to put into words what it feels like when someone hits you, what would you say?” 

Yuuri shrugs, thinking it’s simple. His brain registers the pain his body feels. Nerve endings, nervous system, or something like that. 

Viktor takes Yuuri’s hand suddenly, splaying his fingers out, palm up. He slowly unwraps the gauze from around Yuuri’s hand, and Yuuri feels like he’s being undressed. With the gauze in a pile on the floor, Viktor draws out a little pocketknife, a sleek navy blue hilt with a short but clearly sharp blade. 

Yuuri tries to pull his hand back quickly, but Viktor hums and shakes his head. “It’s okay,” he says. “It’s okay. Yuuri.”

Yuuri stares as the blade touches the center of his palm.

“Look at me, Yuuri,” Viktor says. “I won’t do it unless you say so.”

Yuuri lifts his gaze from his hand to Viktor’s eyes. They glow like the carbon steel of the blade. Like the near-boiling water of the hot springs, deceptively clear and calm until Yuuri’s skin would touch it and burn. 

“Do it,” he finds himself saying. 

“Don’t move. Don’t look away from me,” Viktor instructs, pressing the tip of the blade into the fleshy middle of Yuuri’s palm until the skin breaks. 

Yuuri’s every instinct tells him to recoil, yank his hand away, fight back, but Viktor asked him if he could do it,said  _ don’t look away _ , so Yuuri simply watches the blood rise in a bead to the surface of his skin. Viktor squeezes. 

“Look at me.”

Yuuri grits his teeth. It stings. It stings more than such a tiny prick should. His palm feels hollow, like his skin had been peeled away like fruit skin, and his insides burbled up to the surface. He hisses between his teeth. He lifts his gaze back up.

“Tell me how it feels,” Viktor says, eyes bright. 

“It hurts.”

Viktor squeezes his palm again, and Yuuri lets out a small whine. 

“Inside. Explain it to me.”

“I don’t know! It’s painful. It’s...my skin is throbbing. My pulse is--my heart is pounding. My--my body wants me to run, wants me to fight back, wants--” Yuuri shifts in place, darting a glance back down at the little pool of blood in his palm. Viktor remains watching Yuuri, and there’s something about the way Viktor’s breath sounds in the air, almost frantic, as if he’s excited, as if Yuuri has excited him. 

Viktor pulls Yuuri’s hand up to his lips and flicks his tongue over the tiny incision. Yuuri practically moans at the way it burns when Viktor’s tongue touches the edges of the cut, and then it feels amazing and cold as the wet skin touches the open air. 

“Do you feel powerless, Yuuri?”

Yuuri draws his hand into his chest, watching as more blood rises up to take the place of the beads Viktor took into his mouth. 

“Do you want to hurt me, Yuuri?” Viktor asks, as if he were asking the weather, folding the knife back up and tucking it into his pocket. 

“The crowd is going to watch you bleed, Yuuri, but you’re not going to give them the power. That power is yours. The hurt is yours, Yuuri, do you hear me? You can do whatever you want with it. Those people are going to believe the power is theirs, being on the outside, clean, safe, but the blood is yours, and you decide what they get to take from you. You walk into that fight and choose to feel anything.”

Yuuri feels like he’s drenched in sweat, like he’s sprinted the length of the Atlantic coast.

“There is power in all of it, and I didn’t see that until they told me to fail, until I sat bleeding in the locker room, crying like I’d been given a gift.”

Yuuri feels something as he looks up from his hand to Viktor’s face again. He can’t pinpoint what it is exactly, but he knows that these moments-- as his pulse returns to normal, his muscles loose and mind clear-- these are what he fights for. 

“I’m going to lose to Yuri Plisetski,” Yuuri says, clenching his blood-stained hand into a fist. 

“Don’t let him have any control, Yuuri, and he’ll never feel like the winner,” Viktor replies, crawling forward to brush Yuuri’s fringe back, sliding the sweat-slick strands away from his face. “When it hurts, think of that knick in your palm, the one you took from me. It’s yours. You’re going to take everything from him, and you’re going to make it your own.” 

Yuuri swallows, and the adrenaline tastes like salt and smoke. “I can fight back, though, right?”

Viktor lets out a gruff laugh, brushing his own hair back so Yuuri can see that the side of his face is also slick with sweat. “Yuuri, my foolish protege, unless you’d rather die, I would suggest doing just that.” 


	4. Be My Desire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yuri tries to remember that he and JJ were just kids.  
> Just kids when it all started and thought there was no harm in it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey again, y'all. Here is a nice flashback chapter for everyone wondering what happened with JJ. As always, please leave comments and kudos, and I hope you enjoy this chapter~

Yuri's POV:

 

Yuri tries to remember that he and JJ were just kids.

Just kids when it all started and thought there was no harm in it.

 

“You’re so small,” JJ said, holding up a pair of Yuri’s gym shorts and stretching out the waistband.

“Not too small to rip your kidneys out and make you watch me eat them,” Yuri replied, snatching his shorts back and wriggling into them.

“This is why you have no friends,” JJ said, clicking his tongue. “I mean, aside from me.”

Yuri slammed his locker shut and began rolling gauze from the base of his palms up to his forearms. “We’re not friends. We’re just two kids who live to beat each other up.”

JJ shrugged and followed as Yuri headed out behind the training facility, where he’d set up a bag of flour duct-taped to a rusted pipe as a makeshift punching bag.

“You know you can ask for actual equipment. You’re from one of the wealthier territories,” JJ observed as white dust poofed out from the sack of flour with each strike of Yuri’s fists and ankles.

“This is what I always used. I don’t need Nikiforov’s charity,” Yuri replied, shaking his limbs out to loosen his muscles. “I don’t like owing people anything.”

“You know they’re going to pick you for the rings, don’t you? We’re sixteen now,” JJ said, wiping flour dust from Yuri’s neck where it mixed with his sweat into a translucent paste.

“I don’t care what the Canadians do with your dumb ass,” Yuri retorted, moving into his stretches, legs spread, bending forward until his palms hit the dirt. “I know I’m going to replace Nikiforov when he decides he’s too pretty to get his face fucked up for a living.”

JJ shook his head. “Now. They want you now.”

This made Yuri pause as he slid his feet in the dirt in either direction until he was in a split. He felt JJ’s eyes on him, though he didn’t look up.

JJ was one of the taller kids in their training group. He, like Yuri, had been in the US for a few years already, spoke better English than most of the kids in the immigrant dormitories. JJ still had a bit of a French accent, but Yuri was pretty sure he only kept it for the affectation. He had to admit there was something about the way JJ’s speech seemed to roll from guttural into musical--

Yuri bent forward to grab his toes, still in his split. “How do you know?”

JJ moved to sit on Yuri’s back, forcing Yuri’s forehead down onto his kneecap. Yuri grunted but let his body adjust to the stretch. “Because I heard our coaches talking about it.”

“You too?”

JJ stood back up, offering Yuri his hand. Yuri scoffed at it and heaved himself up to standing.

“Me too. I’m your first fight.”

Yuri tried to form his face into a stoic mask at that news, but his heart had burped up into his mouth, and it tasted like iron and ticked like a watch.

“They didn’t predict a winner either,” JJ added, staring at his fingernails, as if he hadn’t just told Yuri something entirely impossible.

“That’s entirely impossible.”

JJ moved closer, licked his thumb, tried to wipe more flour from Yuri’s cheek. Yuri swatted at him, but JJ was too quick. He stuck his thumb into his mouth.

“You’re disgusting,” Yuri said.

“Think you can beat me?”

Yuri snorted, an ugly sound of disdain and arrogance and amusement.

“If I beat you, they’ll pick me to win going forward, you know that, right?” JJ explained, pulling his white tank top over his head and tossing it aside. Yuri wondered how JJ got so tan when the sun seemed to always be obscured by a thick curtain of pollen and smog. Maybe he was just painted that way from the start. There was something almost obscene about JJ’s skin.  He seemed more naked this way, more solid, like a body. Yuri’s skin was thinner, pale, pale white, translucent enough that he could trace his veins from his fingertips up his arms and down his chest. It was almost like he wasn’t there at all.

Yuri kicked at JJ when his back was turned, a clean sheet of tan canvas for the dirty bottom of Yuri’s foot. He enjoyed seeing the dirt-caked sole of his foot printed onto JJ’s back.

“I could let you win,” JJ said, softly, almost so softly that Yuri didn’t hear him.

“I’d rather die,” Yuri replied, huffing, kicking at JJ’s back again.

“They’re all adults, Yuri. We’re still kids. No one is going to go easy on us,” JJ reminded him, turning around, his expression twisted, brows pulled together, eyes pleading.

“You mean me,” Yuri scoffed. “I’m not afraid of them. I’ve seen them fight. I don’t give a fuck if they can bench a whole house, I am not going to lose.”

“No one can bench a house, Yuri, don’t be ridiculous, but they probably _can_ break you,” JJ replied, jaw tense.

“If I go down, I go down,” Yuri said offhandedly, inspecting the dirt and flour now crusted in his hand wraps. “I don’t care.”

“I care,” JJ said, as if he were telling Yuri what he ate for lunch. Obviously something onion-y--gross Canadian.

“Why, because you sometimes touch yourself while thinking about me, you sick freak?” Yuri joked, shoving at JJ’s shoulders, making him stumble back a few feet.

“How did you--”

JJ’s eyes went wide, then, and Yuri knew he’d hit a nerve.

“You do, don’t you?” Yuri pressed, almost giggling, watching as JJ’s eyes rolled to the left, searching for a lie to forge quickly. “I was just joking, but it seems I’ve discovered your secret, Jack-off Jizzman.” Yuri felt smug as he watched JJ’s hands shaking at his sides.

“I do _not_ ,” he gurgled out, fists so tightly clenched that his knuckles blanched white.

“Hah, you totally do. Touching your little, have-to-compensate-with-arrogance dick and whimpering ‘oh, Yuri, oh, Yuri--’”

Yuri broke off as JJ’s palm landed hard on his cheek, and he reeled back.

“What the--”

JJ grabbed him by the hair and threw him on the ground, and the pain resonated from his tailbone up his spine like a lit fuse. JJ gave Yuri no time to recover, the toe of his ratty boot pounding into Yuri’s side, causing him to curl up into himself, crying out JJ’s name.

JJ landed hard on Yuri’s hips, reaching down to lock his hands around Yuri’s throat. His eyes were wild, open, pupils blown wide. Yuri struggled beneath him, still delirious from the pain of striking the ground, the pain of JJ’s perfectly aimed kick to the soft spot below his ribs. God, it fucking burned like hell.

“I said I _cared about you,_ you stupid--and you never listen--”

JJ’s hands around his throat were warm, so warm, and then, gradually, Yuri didn’t feel anything at all. He felt his pulse at first, dripping smooth and slow like sand in his veins, and then it was in his ears, loud and insistent, building on itself like chords, and then there were butterflies in his throat, trying to escape out of his open mouth, but nothing came.

There were wings in his throat, beating hard, needy, crashing against the walls of his pharynx, and each wave of their little wings thrummed through his entire body. He was numb, knowing he needed to breathe, but also loving how quiet and beautiful his body felt with these needy beating wings inside him, ready to burst out of his skin with how wonderful it felt to fly on the inside.

Without knowing, his hips rose up to meet JJ’s, as if he were being drawn to the flame of JJ’s body, as if JJ’s heat would set him free from this numbness.

“F-Fuck--” he managed to wheeze out, hips stuttering, his fingertips cold and unfeeling.

JJ was rocking against him, panting, and his hands were shaking now, allowing Yuri to draw in a sharp breath and cry, “Oh, fuck--”

Because his cock was hard, and JJ could feel it against his own equally hard cock, and Yuri knew he should be terribly embarrassed, sickened even, but all he could feel was desperate.

He wrapped his hands around JJ’s wrists and squeezed until JJ’s grip tightened back up on his throat, pulsing his grip with Yuri’s squeezes.

“Yuri, no, Yuri we shouldn’t--I didn’t mean to--” JJ groaned as Yuri dug his nails into JJ’s wrists, begging him not to let go of his throat.

Yuri had never felt so free, so free of his damn tiny, useless body, only good at taking punches and fleeing from the sounds of gunfire behind him as he watched his hometown vanish behind the van that took him away.

JJ’s grip tightened again, and the image vanished, replaced all at once with a fading vignette of smoky darkness and a gnawing pleasure in his gut.

“Don’t you dare,” Yuri said, voice barely a whisper, if any sound escaped at all, “stop.”

He was far away, not home, not here in the dirt, just somewhere where he didn’t have to think about anything. Not his family, not the glares of the North American kids who muttered _fascist, terrorist_ , not anything at all.

JJ shuddered above Yuri, and Yuri felt the warm wetness of come through their thin shorts, and fuck, okay, that was kind of hot in an absolutely filthy way, and JJ’s grip loosened as he shook through his orgasm, letting Yuri draw in a harsh gasp as his own release shot through him all at once. It was as if his body had no idea it were coming, so focussed on trying to breathe, and then suddenly the net trapping the wings inside his body dropped, and he was screaming.

His voice was ragged and torn, but he screamed, and it was the most exquisite thing he’d ever felt.

 

JJ tried to apologize, but it was a stupid apology.

“I hurt you.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Yuri groaned, rolling his eyes as he handed JJ the switch their trainers used to discipline them for not making it back in time for curfew. He bent over the bench, ass raised up in the air. “That’s the point.”

JJ marked the backs of his thighs with rough, uneven lacerations, and Yuri rutted his hips into the air needily until JJ wrapped his tan, calloused fingers around Yuri’s cock and made him scream again.

 

JJ didn’t let Yuri win that first fight. Yuri went down fairly, with JJ accepting the audience’s applause, his cheeks spread wide in a beaming smile.

Yuri crawled into JJ’s bed after the fight, his swollen left eye still leaking tears onto the bruised skin of his cheekbone, and JJ wrapped his t-shirt around Yuri’s face, so he could scream into the fabric as JJ fucked him. JJ’s fingers prodded every one of the bruises he formed during their fight, and Yuri lay beneath him, screaming himself raw into the shirt that smelled like mountain snow and clove cigarettes.

 

“Why do you like the pain so much?” JJ asked one night as they stared up at the leaky ceiling above JJ’s cot.

“Why do you like causing it?” Yuri countered, still catching his breath.

“Because I--”

“Like control, I know,” Yuri finished for him rubbing at the claw marks JJ had left on his chest, smirking as he licked his own blood from his thumb.

“It’s more than that. I like giving it to you. You need me, kitten,” JJ replied, eyes following the motion of Yuri’s tongue as it flicked at his finger. Yuri had hated the nickname the first time JJ used it, after he’d made Yuri crawl on his hands and knees until he reached JJ, legs spread at the edge of the bed. _C’mere, kitten, c’mere and I’ll fuck your pretty mouth._ He said Yuri had the look, the one cats always had on their faces when they expected a reward.

“I don’t _need_ you,” Yuri said, eyes narrowing defensively, moving to sit up, but the left side of his body felt like it had been set aflame during his fight earlier in the day.

“I mean in the moment you do,” JJ defended, “Yuri, stop, you know what I meant--”

But Yuri was already gathering his clothing up off the floor, trying to find his socks among the debris littering JJ’s floor (fucking slob), and slipping into his sweatshirt quickly to cover up the marks JJ had left on his collarbone.

“I know what you meant,” Yuri said, refusing to turn around and see JJ’s desperate expression, the one he always made when he watched Yuri walk away, as if the sight of Yuri’s back made him physically ill.

“Then come back here. It’s cold. Please, Yuri, I just meant that I like making you come.”

Yuri rolled his eyes, knowing JJ couldn’t see.

“I have another fight tomorrow at noon. I need to go practice anyhow.”

“It’s four a.m., Yuri, get some sleep with me.”

“Wash your sheets. I don’t want the dorm head to think you’re some kind of masturbation addict,” Yuri said, letting JJ’s heavy wooden door slam closed behind him.

 

Yuri knew it was pathetic, but he couldn’t stop going back to JJ, even though JJ kept saying stupid shit.

His body was addicted to it, and he was terrified to seek it elsewhere. He felt sick with the need. Each time he had to limp to the lockers after a fight, his shoulder popped from its socket or wrist bone prodding brokenly against his skin from the inside, he steeled himself, sitting on the floor of the showers and letting the hot water numb him in place of JJ’s touch.

And when he couldn’t take it anymore, he ended up in front of JJ’s dorm room, shaking with the effort to keep from breaking down his door and beg.

“Help me,” he would whine, rushing inside and locking his legs around JJ’s body, so JJ could crash his back against the wall and take him standing up, fist shoved in Yuri’s mouth to muffle his cries, the other holding Yuri up over his hastily-lubed cock.

 

One summer JJ was taken away because his territory no longer would associate with Yuri’s.

JJ came to him in the middle of the night, sliding in through Yuri’s unlocked window and crawling to the edge of Yuri’s bed.

“Yuri--”

Yuri launched his fist into JJ’s face, terrified of some stranger breaking into his room.

“Fuck, Yuri, it’s me,” JJ muttered, rubbing his jaw.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Yuri sat up, rubbing blearily at his tired eyes that refused to adjust to the darkness, just barely making out JJ’s silhouette.

“Yuri, they’re making me go. They’re taking me to a special new dorm for North American fighters,” JJ hissed, fingers tightening around Yuri’s quilt where he knelt beside Yuri’s bed.

“What are you talking about, JJ? There is already a dorm for North American fighters. But you’ve always been here,” Yuri replied.

“Your country just threatened to bomb us, Yuri,” JJ said, and Yuri tensed.

“We do that all the time. It doesn’t mean we actually will. They can’t just--”

“Yuri, I’m telling you. They made me pack, and I have to leave in the morning.” JJ’s voice was shaking, broken around the edges as if it were trying to make itself disappear, make the words untrue.

“No,” Yuri said, shaking his head. “That’s not true. Stop fucking with me because you want me to admit that I love you or something, this is stupid, JJ, just come kiss me and--”

“Do you?”

Yuri was dumbfounded. First JJ breaks into his room saying some dumb shit about Russia bombing Canada (why would they even bother? What did Canada have to offer?), and then he interrogates Yuri about _love_?

“Do I _what_.”

“What you said before. Do you love me?” JJ looked so serious. Yuri wanted to laugh, but no sound would come out.

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t ask that. C’mere, I’ll suck you off, let you sleep in my bed--just this once, okay?--and then we can forget this ever happened. Good?”

JJ stood, glowering. “I don’t want you,” he spat, face cast in shadow, “to suck me off, goddamnit, Yuri.”

Yuri wanted to be offended because he knew his mouth was amazing, but the only emotion he felt at the time was--

Fear.

“I’ll see you in the ring, Yuri.”

 

The first time Yuri saw JJ after that night, JJ was laughing, the tip of his long, tan nose pressed to the shoulder of some buxom American girl as he laughed.

“God, your tits are magnificent,” he cried triumphantly, cupping the girl’s cheeks and kissing her.

Yuri’s heart seized up and froze.

 

Yuri was finally allowed to win fights his second year in the rings. There were newer fighters that had to suffer through the year-one predicted losses, and Yuri was ecstatic. Not only because it meant the crowds would really have to learn his name, but also because it meant he wouldn’t take as many hits.

Because Yuri couldn’t survive another year of rocking weakly on the tiled floor of the showers until the pulsing need disappeared.

When Yuri had his first loss scheduled, he almost faked sick to get out of the match.

But then he reminded himself that, as Russia was no longer favored as a territory, he would suffer more for skipping than he would in the ring.

It wasn’t the worst fight he’d had to lose. Just some Swiss fighter named Christophe who seemed more interested in “accidentally” flashing the audience than in fighting. Christophe was more powerful than he appeared, considering he had big girly googly eyes and hair like those curly ramen noodles the asian fighters were always eating.

Yuri ended up with only one main injury (aside from the bruises littering his skin, but Yuri couldn’t keep track of who put what where): an ankle sprain that had him hobbling to the lockers after the match.

Christophe took his time with the press after the fight, so Yuri took his time gathering his strength to make it to the showers.

He was limping into the shower stall when he slipped on residual soap and crashed to the floor with a whimper.

“Don’t think I’ve ever heard you make that sound before,” came a voice from outside the stall.

“You must’ve misheard,” Yuri fired back, horribly embarrassed, wanting to curl into a ball, “I didn’t make any sound.”

“I can see your body on the ground, Plisetski.”

“I’m here because I’m comfortable,” Yuri said, failing as he tried to get to his feet.

“Really?”

It was then that Yuri noticed the bouncer’s head at the bottom of the stall door, peering underneath, expression as stoic as it always was during the fights. He was handsome, broad, with a strong jaw and a head of thick dark hair. His eyes were dull, expressionless.

“Looks like a bad sprain to me,” he observed, voice deep and soothing like thunder. “Swollen.”

Yuri peered down at his ankle and grimaced. His left foot was nearly twice the size of his right, and it was completely purple like a puffed up raisin.

“Gross.”

“I can set it,” the bouncer said, crawling under the stall door as if Yuri had invited him, even though Yuri was completely naked and definitely had not done anything of the sort.

“Excuse me, brick-face, I’m kind of fucking naked,” Yuri said.

“I’m Otabek,” the bouncer replied.

Oh, God, a dad joke.

He barely glanced at Yuri’s body, just moved his thick fingers over Yuri’s ankle, prodding lightly. His fingers were much softer than Yuri’s or JJ’s. They didn’t have any of the callouses that he and JJ had garnered over years of beating their skin raw.

The gentleness was off-putting, and Yuri wished desperately he could flee.

“Shit,” he hissed between his teeth as Otabek rolled his ankle in circles, humming softly to himself. “That fucking hurts, you know.”

Otabek hummed again in acknowledgment. He pulled a length of bandage from his pocket and began winding the beige fabric around Yuri’s ankle and down around his foot.

“I said it hurts,” Yuri whined, wanting to kick Otabek’s hands away. It really didn’t hurt at all. In fact, it was probably the most gentle sensation he’d felt since he was a child.

Since his grandfather held him in his lap on his office chair and rocked him through the sounds of gunfire, telling him the lights coming from the sky were falling stars.

He hated it.

“I’m fine,” he gritted out, ashamed to feel the pricks of tears behind his eyelids as he clambered against the tiles to get himself up to standing.

“Whoa there,” Otabek said, quickly rising to his feet to steady Yuri with an arm under his armpit. “Bad sprain, remember?”

“I liked you better when you were just a voiceless brick-face,” Yuri grumbled, shoving the stall door open.

“I’ve always liked you,” Otabek said, quiet, calm, sure, strong. And for a fleeting moment, Yuri forgot all about the pain of his loss, about the need, about fighting altogether.

 

And then Viktor. Viktor, the only one who Yuri had _accidentally_ told about JJ, one drunken night over home-fermented vodka, left him too.

Viktor, who petted Yuri’s hair when Yuri wheezed through his tears, which was disturbingly out of character, snot on Viktor’s coat, utterly wrecked from his misery.

“It hurts,” he’d whimpered, sniffling loudly, Viktor’s cold hands running through the long strands of his blond hair.

“I know, Yurushka, I know,” Viktor had cooed, cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth as he held Yuri. Yuri had been vaguely aware of ash tumbling onto his shoulder.

Viktor was the only one who knew that Russia was home, that Russia wasn’t-- _couldn’t be_ \--their enemy. It was all they had. It was the only thing that got him through the fights, knowing he would one day have enough money to return. To his grandfather, to his bedroom, the smell of warm, meat-filled pastries in the air.

But now, with the immigration ban. The airlines refusing to go--

And JJ--

And then Viktor was gone too. A traitor, gone to help that chubby Japanese boy with his dumb glasses, a boy with _friends_ , a boy with wide, honest eyes, who looked at Viktor the way JJ had once looked at him. Like he’d swallowed the sun, so there was no where else to look to find light.

Yuri wouldn’t go to anyone with the expectation that they would stay. Never again.

Otabek claimed over and over that he had been there from the beginning, and he had no reason to leave.

But Yuri would be damned if anyone tried to make him care again.


End file.
